papercuts

I've been trying, for months now, to put some kind of words to my last year's experience. Or, more to the point, to release somehow my last year's experience, using words. A year spent in giving ceaselessly, willingly, and illogically far more than I had to give. Of time, energy, emotion, money, ideas, and opportunities. To a supposed partner, and to a living situation shared with his mother and his two children, and his unemployment, and his personal struggles and his unfulfilled dreams and potentials, and his - best I can tell - near complete lack of genuine interest in me.

I can't do it. At least not for now. Even though I've been out of the situation almost six months, it's still too tangled and toxic. The unresolved questions, conversations, anger and sadness find me at the most inopportune moments -- 2 a.m. when sleep leaves, or 4 p.m. on deliveries, or mid-chat with a kinder friend. But they refuse to find their way into poetry, prose, or a word picture, so as to find their way out of me and on downstream.

Except, maybe, for this little image. Not the most impressive analogy ever, but it'll do for now. The pain of the experience is not, nor was it at any point, a mortal blow or a gaping wound. Nothing so acceptedly or obviously insidious occurred that I can point to it and justify this pervasive, whole-self accumulation of suffering and self-second-guessing that I now walk around with. But the experience was, overall, kind of like getting 1,000 papercuts. One after another after another. And now I have them all over. They are on every part of me: on mind, on body, on psyche, on heart. They are inside and out. They amplify my raised pulse-rate in their raw surfaces like any new cut does. And they're healing really, really slowly.

It gets hard to sit still for long, without rubbing against a few dozen of them. I turn over in the night and awaken the sting of several more. A well-intentioned acquaintance gives me a hug, or claps me on the shoulder, and wonders why I burst into tears. Spring wind picks up dust and grit off the sidewalk and I run flinching for the nearest shelter. Working with my hands, even typing, is difficult for the slices running across fingerprints and lifelines. I see them scarring my cheeks and lips when I look in the mirror, and wonder if anybody else notices this. I breathe deep, asking the body to give up just a shred of its tensed outrage and trauma, and feel the tiny slices burning in the lining of my stomach. Those, of course, come from all the words that I swallowed.

I'm not going to attempt to write about how exactly the papercuts happened. The analogy would start to break down there. And anyway, that's another part of the pain: he and I never, ever could agree on how any painful situation came about. It was my fault, or some personal problem of mine:  that was the only conclusion. And all the little incidents were so mundane, or so personal, or both, that they simply can't be respoken. It was really the razor of their unexpectedness that made the cut, every time. So. I'm leaving the subject it as it is: unhealed. And, for the moment (and maybe for the indefinite) a largely inexplicable, and largely failed experiment at understanding. I'm not asking for excessive amounts of sympathy here. I should've let it go a lot sooner. I can see that I was overly optimistic and patient. If not downright certifiable, for accepting some aspects of it. But if you see me on the street or at the coffeeshop, don't mention those lines on my face, okay? Hopefully, they're temporary. And pardon me if you offer a hand or a hug and I back away. It's nothing personal. It's just that my skin needs more time to knit itself back together again.